My tips for beating Corruption Seraph (Spoilers)

[burkettryan]

Just a few tips when he is your boss.
-Throw a health upgrade on your back line glass cannons if you don't have all armor generation.
-Use daze spells to stop Seraph from attacking. Put Frozen on them so you can have them when Seraph enters your key row.
-Use Ascend/Descend spells to kick Seraph off your row.
-Use Morsel's, an Endless unit or Funguy Troops to tank Seraph's attacks.
-Stack mega Sap to stop his attack

Once you have a game plan for him set spend the rest of the time planning to kill the double upped 400+ HP dudes that come with them.

Also if you get the Savagery Seraph keep some targeting dmg spells handy for the sweepers.

Happy hunting.

[Hezz]

Don't forget Mute. That helps tremendously, too. Stygian Guard are really good at this, just had a run where I managed to get a couple of of Unnamed Tomes, one was Intrisic and the other Doublestack. 15 turns of guaranteed mute on Seraph (granted he was Dominion in this run but it works for Corruption too) basically means all he can do is basic attack damage for the entire fight.

Went on to kill the Titans with this, too. 15 turns of Mute on both Savagery and Dominion Titans meant I didn't need to worry about any stacking Sap on my units, nor did I need to worry about having units on every floor as it disables Savagery's Pyre damage effect.

Silence effects are extremely strong, never underestimate them. The Circle of Silence room or the relic that makes enemies enter the train with 1 stack of Mute can really hard counter some enemy types.

[burkettryan]

Originally posted by Hezz:

Don't forget Mute. That helps tremendously, too. Stygian Guard are really good at this, just had a run where I managed to get a couple of of Unnamed Tomes, one was Intrisic and the other Doublestack. 15 turns of guaranteed mute on Seraph (granted he was Dominion in this run but it works for Corruption too) basically means all he can do is basic attack damage for the entire fight.

Went on to kill the Titans with this, too. 15 turns of Mute on both Savagery and Dominion Titans meant I didn't need to worry about any stacking Sap on my units, nor did I need to worry about having units on every floor as it disables Savagery's Pyre damage effect.

Silence effects are extremely strong, never underestimate them. The Circle of Silence room or the relic that makes enemies enter the train with 1 stack of Mute can really hard counter some enemy types.

Great tips, I am definitely underestimating mute. Will have to give that more of a try.

[n13e86]

Originally posted by burkettryan:

Great tips, I am definitely underestimating mute. Will have to give that more of a try.

Mute is probably the strongest effect in the game.
If you try using it, you will notice just how many things it counters.
For easiest access to it, try Madam Lionsmane's Maneater tree - she gets to apply Mute on second upgrade (early enough to ignore the Incant enemies for the rest of the game).

[Hezz]

Originally posted by n13e86:

Originally posted by burkettryan:

Great tips, I am definitely underestimating mute. Will have to give that more of a try.

Mute is probably the strongest effect in the game.
If you try using it, you will notice just how many things it counters.
For easiest access to it, try Madam Lionsmane's Maneater tree - she gets to apply Mute on second upgrade (early enough to ignore the Incant enemies for the rest of the game).

Absolutely. It doesn't stop all potiential threats, like Sweepers on a Savagery Seraph run will still demolish you if you don't plan accordingly, Thorns still does damage, and enemies wiill still spawn in with Titanskin, Damage and Spell Shields, and any base buffs like Reincarnate and Rage, but it stops any Incant, on-hit effect, Resolve effect, and on-death effect. Notable this stops almost all forms of Corruption, stops Dominion casters from buffing up the attack of the enemies on Incant, prevents healers from healing, stops enemies from adding blights to your deck, etc. Definitely an extremely powerful effect.

In fact, that's how I won the Dimensional Portal challenge where all your units have Ascend and your Pyre has 2 damage shields and Fragile. Right away I knew I couldn't possibly reliably have units on the first and second floor for the enemies that do damage to the Pyre if the floor is empty, so I searched hard for a Circle of Silence room, got it duplicated, and shoved them both on the 1st and 2nd floors of the train, so all I had to worry about was having a strong killbox on the top floor (which Ascend makes pretty easy as you can jam in a lot of units with that). No Resolve effect means those guys couldn't do any damage to the Pyre.

[HouseOfTheRat]

All these are really basic techniques. They are all great, and they work on almost any boss. - if the boss doesn't attack you and doesn't get to use its gimmick, any fight is easier! Just goes to show that there is nothing special at all about Dominion Seraph. It's all about how you choose to fight him.

[Averagedog]

Originally posted by HouseOfTheRat:

All these are really basic techniques. They are all great, and they work on almost any boss. - if the boss doesn't attack you and doesn't get to use its gimmick, any fight is easier! Just goes to show that there is nothing special at all about Dominion Seraph. It's all about how you choose to fight him.

yep, I learned this the hard way

I was doing an Awoken/LunarCoven run and got to dominion seraph for the third final boss ticket for the first time. I lost because too many unavoidable corruption stacks on my tank by the time the final round came up.

[HouseOfTheRat]

It is perfectly understandable to have this happen the first time you fight Seraph. Some people want to take their time to see what they are dealing with when facing a new threat; so then you realize that you are already dead, and after that you are - hopefully - thinking about how to beat him next time.

Btw Awoken/Luna feels nicely thematic. How about some achievements for clan combos with a thematic connection (note this is not necessarily the same as lore connection)?

[Cindeerella]

Originally posted by Hezz:

. 15 turns of Mute on both Savagery and Dominion Titans l

Dominion is a Pyre room Titan, you don’t want mute him as he doesn’t generate Pyre attack cards than.

[Hezz]

Originally posted by Cindeerella:

Originally posted by Hezz:

. 15 turns of Mute on both Savagery and Dominion Titans l

Dominion is a Pyre room Titan, you don’t want mute him as he doesn’t generate Pyre attack cards than.

Woops, I always get Entropy and Dominion mixed up. For some reason I always associate Entropy with the "inevitable death" that is best related to corruption, and Dominion with the concept of control and stasis, which is best related to all the Sap etc features. Naturally, I meant putting mute on Savagery and Entropy titans. You can't physically put Mute on the corruption titan in the pyre room as you can't play any cards on that room. The only way to Mute him as far as I'm aware is if you happen upon the Balatro event and pick the Joker that mutes bosses for 3 turns.

There *is* a slight advantage on having Mute on the corruption titan through this method, though, and that is that for the first three turns you essentially have 1 energy more for getting your floors set up, because you won't have to worry about use the Pyre Light card for a couple of turns. But yeah, I definitely wouldn't want a long lasting Mute on him.

[n13e86]

Originally posted by Hezz:

You can't physically put Mute on the corruption titan in the pyre room as you can't play any cards on that room.

You can!
Just not unit cards (because that space is taken by the pipes), and not buffs on the Pyre (just because). Playing cards in that room is useful when other floors have Incant enemies and you need something that's like "create a Morsel" or "make an Infusion".

[Vatn]

Originally posted by Hezz:

Originally posted by Cindeerella:

Dominion is a Pyre room Titan, you don’t want mute him as he doesn’t generate Pyre attack cards than.

Woops, I always get Entropy and Dominion mixed up. For some reason I always associate Entropy with the "inevitable death" that is best related to corruption, and Dominion with the concept of control and stasis, which is best related to all the Sap etc features. Naturally, I meant putting mute on Savagery and Entropy titans. You can't physically put Mute on the corruption titan in the pyre room as you can't play any cards on that room. The only way to Mute him as far as I'm aware is if you happen upon the Balatro event and pick the Joker that mutes bosses for 3 turns.

In the fight against the Titans, you can play spells inside the Pyre room.

[Pastapockets]

Silence doesn't actually stop the seraph action that corrupts your entire floor so that doesn't help.

[n13e86]

Originally posted by Pastapockets:

Silence doesn't actually stop the seraph action that corrupts your entire floor so that doesn't help.

Silence does affect Action. It affects every trigger other than Summon (and only because that happens before anything is applied).
You're probably thinking of Zone of Silence, the room affecting non-boss enemies.

[Jaeus]

Originally posted by HouseOfTheRat:

All these are really basic techniques. They are all great, and they work on almost any boss. - if the boss doesn't attack you and doesn't get to use its gimmick, any fight is easier! Just goes to show that there is nothing special at all about Dominion Seraph. It's all about how you choose to fight him.

This.
It's one of those things where I guess he saw some of the difficulty gripes and decided to chime in from the few low cov runs he had or something.

A lot of that "advice" is great, but also painfully generic, not available to many clans, and involves nonsense like hard steering toward Merchants of Steel and hoping you have the money to vomit health upgrades AND rerolls potentially... like what? That's not advice at that point or a tip.

In general, most runs do not die to any given Seraph, they die to not having become overpowered enough to roll any given Seraph, and often 1 or more potential major or even minor bosses before him, solely due to a significant amount of RNG on top of clan variance and imbalance. And the RNG becomes both more extreme and everything more expensive per covenant rank.
If you were hoping for a game that's fun beyond the low difficulties, this isn't it. And you had several years of Monster Train 1 to see that it's not. Thankfully, it's a $20 game.